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Fourteen-year-old Eugene shows up bloody and alone at his doorstep the evening his father disappears. His siblings, John and Mia, don't ask him any questions. The thought to do so doesn't cross the mind of Eugene's mother, Hannah, either. Detectives also ignore him, even though he allegedly was the last to see his father. Eugene has a rare genetic condition called Angelman syndrome, which renders him unable to communicate through speech. His family struggled for years to converse with him, and they have almost entirely resigned trying, as have others around him. Told from Mia's perspective, Angie Kim's Happiness Falls is a unique mystery where a missing father is just the beginning of a family really getting to know each other. It demands that readers take a look into their own preconceptions of people in their lives, both those they have interacted with regularly and those they don't know, including the more marginalized of society — this novel is about everyone being seen as multidimensional.

My favorite parts of Happiness Falls are the memories Mia recounts. They almost always include the whole family, and serve as a way for Kim to tell readers about characters' past and present selves — about how Mia and John almost telepathically communicate as children, about Eugene's feeling seen in his relationship with his grandmother, then about heartbreaking moments where he isn't seen at all. Each memory spotlights individuals while also characterizing everyone else involved.

Eugene's lack of vocalization informs every character's assumption that he is not worth intellectually interacting with. If only someone would try to communicate with him, they would be much closer to knowing what happened to his father. Kim articulates the complexity of this situation well and with grace.

As much as I loved Happiness Falls, some directive choices made it a little less enjoyable for me, including Mia as the first-person narrator. Though I usually prefer unlikeable characters, as Mia can be, she seems like the least interesting character in the novel and a vessel for the story, as opposed to a whole person. Even with her thoughts and meditations throughout the narrative, I couldn't really connect with and invest in her. I connected better with everyone else, no matter how little or much could be gleaned from their characters. To me, Mia felt more like a third-person limited speaker with a bit of a voice.

In fact, I felt the most emotionally invested in Eugene. Within all of Kim's wonderful writing, I was still left so curious about Eugene's personhood outside the context of his disability and familial relationships. Most of the characterization we get of Eugene is tied to his lack of speech, but he feels like such a core part of the novel that I wanted more of him.

That said, Happiness Falls is not only a great suspense novel where every page pulls you toward the edge of a horrific cliffhanger, it is also a novel that confronts you. It alerts you to the possibility of biases you might harbor in your own life. It wakes you up — both in the sense that you can't rest amid its intense mystery, and in how it demands you really see others for who they are, regardless of how they might look on the outside.

Reviewed by Lisa Ahima

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Rated 5 out of 5 by Cloggie Downunder
An informative, moving and utterly enthralling read.
“…a man doesn’t come home from the park. The boy he was with, his youngest son, runs home by himself, scraped up, blood under his nails, traumatized.”

Happiness Falls is the second novel by Korean-American author, Angie Kim. When Mia Parkson’s father goes missing, a combination of factors sees her ignoring signs that should have set alarm bells ringing, and results in a delay of at least four hours before a search for him starts.

Complicating everything is the fact that the one person who might know what happened to him, her fourteen-year-old brother, Eugene, has been diagnosed both with autism and Angelman syndrome: his motor dysfunction means he doesn’t speak. Further complicating matters is the fact that this all takes place in June 2020, with its attendant COVID tests, quarantines and hospitalisations.

As the search gets underway, a persistent police detective questions the family: Mia, her twin brother, John, and their mother, Dr Hannah Park, for any out of character detail that might offer a clue. They explore numerous possibilities trying to work out where Adam Parson might have gone and why: the idea of his leaving Eugene to fend for himself is rejected out of hand.

But a voicemail on Adam’s cell phone, and out-of-state use of his ATM card, has them wondering just how well they knew him. And cell phone footage from bystanders has the police looking at Eugene, making the family determined to protect him from the stress of an interrogation they feel he hasn’t the ability to withstand.

Over the next hours, a series of urgent, awful emergencies keep getting interrupted and displaced by more urgent, more awful emergencies, and as John and Hannah try to keep the family functioning, and to prevent Eugene from the distress of detention, Mia searches her father’s computer, making some disturbing discoveries…

The research data on happiness that Mia finds in Adam’s computer has her wondering if their family were mere guinea pigs for his study of the subject. And eventually, the family comes to understand that perhaps they don’t know Eugene as well as they have always believed.

Kim explores a number of fascinating topics in this riveting mystery: the concept of happiness and the many theories around it; attitudes to oral fluency, verbal skills and their relation to intelligence; and the danger of assumptions and misconceptions. She deftly illustrates the trap that probably few will avoid: “Just because you can’t speak doesn’t mean you can’t think or understand.” An informative, moving and utterly enthralling read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Faber & Faber.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Robin
The Key to Happiness
The book not only seeks to unravel the mystery of a missing father but offers reflections on happiness, musings on the assumptions we all make, and parses out decision making processes. While that might seem like too much for one novel to bear, Angie Kim handles it all ably. The author’s note is a great resource, be sure to read it.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Gloria M
Imaginative Plot!!
Angie Kim is an excellent writer! This is evident from her choice of quotes to comprise her epigraph at the very beginning of "Happiness Falls." Some readers may be initially reluctant to choose a GMA Book Club selection as it is too "popular/trendy" but, at least in this case, that would mean missing one of the best novels of the year.

The plot is imaginative, the characters are compelling and the musings about life and purpose and the connections to our loved ones are thought provoking. Mia is the twenty year old narrator of this tale about a crisis experienced by a Virginian family. Her father is missing and a page turning mystery rapidly unfolds. The personal drama and secrets of Mia, her mom, her dad, her twin brother John, and her younger brother Eugene (suffering from a rare genetic disease and unable to speak) are slowly revealed, layers of a large onion gradually pulled away.

The elements of philosophy and purpose and deep questions regarding our human connections will prove relevant to most readers. It is a well woven piece of fiction and it is difficult to reveal more without divulging spoilers and disrupting the fun of discovering all the details. Without question this book deserves five stars. The characters, the emotions it generates and the musings it inspires will remain in the reader's thoughts for quite some time.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Techeditor
Amazing
I didn't see how Angie Kim could do better than her earlier book, MIRACLE CREEK. But I'm happy to tell you she did. I'm amazed with HAPPINESS FALLS and in more ways than one.

Mia tells the story that begins with her missing father. During her family's search for him, they learn many partial truths. Did they really know him as well as they thought?

Even more so, this book is about Eugene, Mia's younger brother. He is autistic and also has Angelman syndrome, which is so misunderstood both in this story and in real life. They did not know Eugene as well as they thought.

HAPPINESS FALLS deals not only with a missing father but, also, a suspect brother who cannot communicate. In so doing it amazes as it takes on many issues and surprising twists.

And in the end, is there really a determination?

This review is of an advanced copy of HAPPINESS FALLS.

Rated 3 out of 5 by Cathryn Conroy
An Overrated Novel: Disjointed Plot, One-Sided Characters, and Hyped-Up Prose
This is billed as a "thrilling page-turner": A married father of three children goes missing. Is he dead? If he is dead, was it an accident or murder? Was he kidnapped? Did he skip town with a possible paramour? If you, like me, choose to read this book thinking it's a mystery or thriller, you'll be confused at first…and then disappointed.

It's not a thriller. Or a mystery.

Instead, it's an intelligent treatise on the nature of happiness, a thoughtful, empathetic discourse on the difficulty of human communication and personal interaction and the bias against those who have trouble expressing themselves, and a probe about how much (or little) we know about our immediate family, the people with whom we are supposed to be the closest.

Taking place in June 2020 in a Northern Virginia suburb outside Washington, D.C.—so a few months after the Covid pandemic started and lockdown began—this is the story of Adam Parson and Hannah Park and their three children: John and Mia, who are college-age twins, and 14-year-old Eugene, who is not only autistic, but also has Angelman syndrome, leaving him unable to verbally communicate. Adam is a stay-at-home dad, who spends hours and hours with Eugene, working with him in therapy. On the morning Adam disappeared, he and Eugene had been in a park overlooking the Potomac River. Something happened to greatly upset Eugene, who ran home without his father, something he had never done. Adam never came home. Eugene is the only one who knows what happened to his dad, but he can't communicate.

This story is sidetracked early on as Mia, in whose somewhat annoying/know-it-all first person voice the book is narrated, rambles on and on and on about many other things than the mystery at hand. Perhaps author Angie Kim is trying to mimic a 20-year-old's voice, but some of the sentences are so digressive and longwinded at more than 150 words, that it's hard to keep up as the reader.

I found the plot disjointed, the characters one-sided, and too many of the plot's little twists and turns not believable. The prose was often hyped-up, as if on steroids. While parts of the novel were riveting, most of it was just exhausting to read.

And the mystery of Adam's disappearance? It's resolved in a most unsatisfactory way—that is, if you thought this was a mystery/thriller novel in the first place. It's all about expectations. And that's rather amusing, considering the premise of the novel's treatise on happiness is all about expectations.

I know I'm in the minority. So many professional and reader reviews raved about this book. Kirkus even gave it a starred review. But it just didn't work for me.